मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Scratch it!

Asian Age informed on February 2, 2008: “Scratching does ease the itch you get.”

Big deal. As if I didn’t know this.

Well, what they mean is that scientists now have found reasons why scratching is pleasurable.

In 1978, I was infected with scabies खरूज, king of all skin ailments in India. I got it from my dear friend “Ravya“ R E Bedekar. I very well knew that scabies was contagious but took no precaution. In no time, scabies had spread even to my genitals.

For few days it was still not diagnosed. Home remedies were being tried.
Then I saw our family Ayurvedic doctor – (Dr. Adivrekar). He asked me if I had visited any hooker or, if not, if I wore clothes of someone who did. It was a bad time to receive the diagnosis. My mother had just undergone a major operation and was still in the hospital.

I felt scared.

To get second opinion, I saw our family allopathic doctor (Dr. Sathe) who immediately diagnosed it- to my lasting relief- as scabies and prescribed me a white lotion (I forget its name but will recognize its smell even today) and some tablets. My sister helped me apply the lotion.

Venerable education expert Dr. Chitra Naik- who along with her husband J P Naik have done so much to promote education in India- once told her television interviewer that she always carried skin ointment while traveling to villages because it acted as a passport to a home in rural India where at least one member of a largish household suffered from scabies!

At a global IT giant where I worked, I always admired gall (pun intended!) of a very senior manager who scratched his genitals, in full view of everyone he was talking to, without a care in the world. I was always amused, never angry by his action. I understood his compulsion!


Artist: Peter Arno The New Yorker 13 June 1931
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